EX_MACHINA PART TWO

 

Reframing of the conceptual framework:

/The Archive, as an abstraction of the future, is not an object or place in this new world. Rather it comes from the tissue of the system as a whole. Information is stored in the aerogel and graphene as it is stored in our computers or our dna. As the organism grows, it can fragment and decompose at will. The rubble from decomposition carries petabytes of information within their very molecular structure. While the ramifications of this are unknown,  Jean-Paul Sartre’s approach to existentialism may clarify why this information must be shed.

/In “Nausea”, Sartre explains through narrative that in western culture, existents drive our conception of essences, not the other way around. Characteristics such as smell or taste or color are mere vestiges of collective subjectivity. These attributes that we project onto objects are a mere simplification of said object’s existence, which in its reality is an obscene and profound nothingness; an emptiness which is timeless and therefor has no explicit relation to past or future. Rather than basing derivative copies on a stable model, we mentally construct stable models that are used as general references. In short, the idea of the idividual is a construct. The reality as we know it in the present may be that any living thing is the conglomeration of all the thoughts, actions, experiences and perceptions that it has: information.

/The Archive is an active and recursive system that is only for itself and is comprised of the void of consciousness. As such, to create a physical construct to represent the past or the future would be fallacious in the argument for an existential architecture. So data scavenging nomads and any of us who have not outgrown the fetishizing of the past can sift through the nondescript rubble of graphene and aerogel, looking for that old memory or that prediction of the future. Ex Machina allows those who wish to squander their potential with nostalgia to do so, while it grows and evolves without them.